Marketplace - Access to federal data in flux

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Last month, key federal data sets were removed from government websites following actions by the Donald Trump administration, and researchers rushed to preserve the information. David Van Riper of IPUMS, an organization dedicated to improving public access to government data, talked to “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal about the importance of these statistics. Plus, Walmart expands and diversifies, ChatGPT has lots of rivals as well as a huge user base, and the U.S. solar industry adapts without Biden-era tax credits.

Corporate news to start, government data and the absence of it to follow. And then they keep using that word. It does not mean what they think it means. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdal. It is Thursday today, the 20th of February. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Those of you who've been wondering what's going on on Wall Street, how traders seem so sanguine given the uncertainty, the answer came to us early this morning, 7 a.m. local

time in Bentonville, Arkansas, to be specific, the quarterly earnings call from the world's biggest retailer, during which Walmart CEO Doug MacMillan touted some of the highlights. Advertising sales were up 29% last quarter, he said. Its third-party marketplace grew 34%. Membership income grew double digits as well. But careful listeners will have noticed that none of those things are actually retail sales. Daniel Ackerman gets us going with what Walmart's up to besides just selling things. Walmart, the quintessential big box, right?

Not anymore. They've done a pretty good job the last couple of years investing in these alternative businesses. Michael Baker heads consumer research at T.A. Davidson. He says those alternative businesses include taking a cut from third parties who sell through Walmart's website. Walmart also sells ads on said website. It offers shipping services, too. And one reason Walmart can do all that, says Chi-Hong Lee, a business professor at UConn, is because it's really big.

They have the scale. They have the infrastructure and they have the expertise. Walmart has thousands of trucks, warehouses, and stores, plus a fancy web platform, all initially built for its sprawling retail business. Jason Miller is a professor of supply chains at Michigan State. When you build up all of these resources that may have excess capacity, if you can sell that on the marketplace and make sense. Miller says this isn't an original idea. For instance, Amazon has allowed third-party sellers

on its platform for decades, and Walmart is following suit. Some of these third-product resellers may be selling niche goods that Walmart itself would never want to stock in inventory and sell itself. And what it does is it gives the consumer a broader product portfolio. Michael Baker of DA Davidson says there's a reason Walmart is leaning into its advertising, logistics and marketplace services. All fall into this heading of alternative businesses and all have higher margins. They're pretty profitable. Baker says Walmart can use that profit to keep prices low at its retail stores, something that could come in handy. At times when the core business might be a little bit more impacted by some external factors.

Because at the end of the day, retail is still Walmart's core business. It sells more stuff to Americans than anyone else. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace. It's worth a note here that Walmart is the first of the big retailers to report earnings. So perhaps more bad tidings to come in this moment when consumers, as we have been telling you, are a tad irritable. Elsewhere on Wall Street, big bank shares took a tumble today too. We will have the details when we do the numbers. There are a lot of questions about what's happening in and to this economy right now.

We've covered some of them the past couple of weeks. And here's another. Who does, and more to the point, who does not have access to government data, specifically public data sets from the CDC and other key agencies that have been taken offline? We're going to talk about government data today and tomorrow, what happens when it goes away, and why we need it. David Van Riper is the director of spatial analysis for something called the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Series known colloquially as EPUMS, which makes sometimes unwieldy government data sets

easier to use. Welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. This will sound like a silly question, but I don't really think it is. Why does what you do matter? So I think of federal statistical data sets like an X-ray, and they provide information about the population

throughout the US, diving all the way down to individual neighborhoods. And thinking of it as an X-ray, we can really hone in on various parts of the body and really figure out what's going on in our communities. Okay, so given that the state of play here with access to federal data is in flux, it does seem like some of the data has come back, some of it maybe not. My question is, was there a moment in the last three and a half, four weeks when you

woke up and said, oh shoot, this is bad? Yeah, so I went to bed on Thursday, January 30th, kind of thinking that the next day was going to be a kind of a regular work day. And I woke up on the 31st and got to my office and started looking at Slack and social media and started to realize that, oh, a lot of the Centers for Disease Control data are not available anymore and started to realize that, oh, this could become a problem for people who rely on these data to carry out their day-to-day jobs.

Say more about that. Say more about those problems. Yeah, so a lot of people have built workflows. They kind of build these data sets into their day-to-day operations. They're continually going to federal statistical websites to look up documentation, to download data files, and all of a sudden those were no longer accessible.

And if you didn't have those data sets downloaded to your local computing system, you started to get real nervous about how you were gonna access those data, potentially a long time into the future. You and your colleagues in Point of Fact actually spent some frenzied moments there in late January, early February, downloading basically everything you could. We did.

We wanted to make sure that we had all of the data and documentation, especially that we needed for our particular data products. We were also getting inquiries from groups around the country asking us if we had grabbed data set X or data set Y. And we were in communication with other organizations and people who were also grabbing and downloading as much data as they could. We don't know what's going to happen with federal data. The management of it right now is chaotic at best, and I guess that leads to this question.

What happens if in six weeks somebody flips a switch and this data just vaporizes and never comes back. I think the research community has done a lot of work in the last, you know, three weeks to download as much data as they could as it's come back online. Right now it's mostly, we're going through a process of documenting who has what data. Going forward though, if federal statistical products are delayed or are no longer provided, if they're canceled, it's going to be like we've taken that x-ray machine away from a doctor. We're not going to know what's going on in communities and being able to measure whether or not specific policies

are having the expected impact. Those statistical data sets are really fundamental for that measurement. So it's interesting. I went to your website and I went to the mission statement and the first sentence in the mission statement is, Ipams democratizes access to the world's social and economic data for current and future generations. That seems unobjectionable. And I guess I wonder, as a guy now who's been doing this for decades, right?

What do you make of this current moment? I think it's definitely concerning, right? I think we've never seen such a widespread removal of public access to data that should be made available to the public. It's all paid for by our tax dollars. And without that public data, you really have to rely on other channels of communication, which might be biased or which might be telling you know, telling you a story they want you to hear. But we as a population aren't allowed to see the data to make our own assessments of what's going on.

David Van Ryper at Ipham's at the University of Minnesota. David, thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. If we've learned anything the past, what, decade, maybe 15 years, it's that the key metric for digital economy companies, no matter the industry, is the number of active users, weekly, monthly, take your pick. That's true for streaming companies, it's true for social media platforms, and it turns out it's true for AI companies too. Reuters reports that ChatGPT now has more than 400 million weekly active users. That's up 30% in just the past couple of months. The growth comes as chatbot competition overall has been heating up given DeepSeq, the highly

capable as you might remember, but purportedly much cheaper to build model from China. The success of free open source models like that, like DeepSec, does put some focus on how AI companies can monetize their products and also whether they can recoup the billions of dollars that have been spent so far. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino takes that one. 400 million weekly active users is nothing to sneeze at, says Eric Sufert, an independent

tech analyst at Mobile Dev Memo. But the problem is consumers are just going to migrate to whichever model or whichever app they feel best serves them. About a month ago, DeepSeep topped Apple's download charts. This week, it's the latest version of XAI's Grok. Then there's Perplexity, Anthropix Claw, Google's Grok. Then there's perplexity, anthropics Claude, Google's Gemini. Large language models have become a commodity, says Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus of cognitive

science at NYU and author of Taming Silicon Valley. Everybody's using the same formula to make essentially the same kind of thing, which makes it hard for any of them to say their product is distinct from anybody else's. Which means companies are likely to compete on price, says Ted Mortenson, tech strategist at Baird. You're going to see a race to zero in the near term. Most companies already offer a free tier, and they'll be under pressure to keep lowering

prices for advanced features, Mortenson says. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X the company was losing money even on its pro subscriptions, which cost $200 a month. Computing costs should come down as semiconductor efficiency improves, says Doug O'Loughlin at SemiAnalysis. As hardware improves, yeah, we see cost downs of like one-tenth, one-hundredth. But consumer chatbot memberships aren't likely to drive profits for AI companies, says analyst Andy Thurai at Constellation Research. What will? Tailoring AI systems for industries that will pay a premium for productivity gains, like

healthcare, law, or finance. It's about the business use case, the business problems you solve with it. And AI companies might also look to make money the way most apps do, advertising. Megan McCarty-Corino for Marketplace. Coming up. There's like little simple things that people are like, you can just shut off the water. And I'm like, what do you mean? First time home ownership. Am I right?

First, though, let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial is down 450 points today. Sounds like a lot. It's 1%, 44,176. The Nasdaq down 93 points, about a half percent, 19,962. The S&P 500 slipped 26 points, 4 tenths percent, 61 and 17. Just heard from Dan Ackerman about Walmart's other lines of business. Besides retail, the company posted fourth quarter earnings that were strong,

but shares nonetheless down six and a half percent target Missed to the tune of two percent Chipotle says it's using AI to hire 20,000 workers specifically to prep for a period from March to May that they are calling. I'm not making this up Burrito season one might fairly ask is it AI that's trying to make burrito season happen Chipotle down 1.4 percent today bonds BonzeRose yield on the 10-year T-note 4.50%. You're listening to Marketplace. This economy can be complicated. That's why the Marketplace newsletter makes understanding it all simple.

Get smart takes on the week's biggest stories delivered to your inbox every Friday. No jargon, no hype, just economics you can use. Sign up today at Marketplace.org slash subscribe. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdal. The setup for this next segment is that words have meaning, and sometimes the ways words are used doesn't really match what those words mean. The word of the day today is saving or savings in the plural, as in Elon Musk and his operatives

say their government cuts so far total $55 billion in savings. Setting aside for a second the reporting that NPR has done that documents just a quarter of that amount, government saving money that is not spending it isn't saving the way most of us think about it. My name is Martha Gimble. I'm the executive director of the budget lab at Yale. There's no dollar that the federal government is spending that isn't going somewhere. And so whenever we're talking about cuts,

we have to talk about what we're no longer going to be getting for those dollars. For instance, the savings the Trump administration is promising by cutting or capping funding for research at the National Institutes of Health. If we're thinking about living standards moving forward, we have to be really figuring out how to drive productivity, drive innovation, et cetera. And we know that one of the things that drives productivity

and innovation in the United States is our national commitment to and funding for research. I'm Justin Wolfers. I'm a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. The Department of Transportation, you might have seen, just fired a bunch of analysts and economists whose job it was to figure out which infrastructure projects would be the best government investments.

So you fire those folks, probably save $100,000 in payroll, and in return you might go and invest $400 million in a roads project that doesn't yield much of a benefit. You've saved a little bit, but we're all going to be a whole heck of a lot worse off as a result. A pause here, if I might, for the idea that government should be run like a business. For a business, outlays are almost always a bad thing. Spending more money on your suppliers, that hurts your bottom line. But every time the government writes a check to someone's grandmother, we call it social security, that's actually the government doing its job. That's actually a benefit. My name is Elena Patel.

I'm an assistant professor at the University of Utah and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. Another item from the headlines that the Internal Revenue Service has started mass firings today, 7,000 people, mostly in the enforcement division, who had been funded by the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. We know that every dollar that you cut reduces federal revenue. We learned that last year when Republicans tried to cut some of the extra IRA funding. The CBO scored that as a net revenue loser.

Saving money and salaries, but losing revenue because every dollar spent on the IRS nets the government well more than a dollar in tax receipts. You roll all of that together, here's what you got. When you're talking about economic growth, those things are incredibly harmful. Music Two items now from the folder we keep around here labeled, sure, you can try to fight the market. First of all, data from Cox Automotive, 9.1% of new car sales in this economy last month were EVs. That's up from 7.4% January a year ago. Also, and second, the share of power

in the United States coming from renewable sources in 2024 hit 24%, boosted by a record amount of solar generating capacity. That's from a report out today from Bloomberg's Energy Research Group and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. That growth in solar, by the way, was helped along by tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, tax credits that are now in some jeopardy. So the industry is figuring out how to get along without them. Marketplace's Henriette reports. The solar industry is no stranger to challenges. Tariffs on imported panels, labor shortages, long waits to connect new projects

to the grid. Abigail Ross Hopper is president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. Many here call it the solar coaster, kind of up and down and up and down. In 2024, the ride was mostly up. Tax credits were available and regulations stayed fairly steady, she says. And when that's the case... People are willing to either invest their personal capital and put something on their home or literally hundreds of millions of dollars and build something. Whatever happens to the tax credits, solar has something going for it in the energy market, says Dennis Womsted at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

We've gotten to a point where it's just incredibly cheap to build and it provides electricity that has no variable fuel cost. Electricity demand is growing again in the US for the first time in about 15 years as more data centers, manufacturing plants and EVs suck up more power. So Womstead says solar's speed of deployment works to its advantage. You can build a solar plant in 12 to 18 months. If you want to build that as a gas plant, it's going to take you four to five years.

And unlike a natural gas plant or even a wind turbine, solar arrays can be set up pretty much anywhere, says Tara Narayanan at Bloomberg NEF. You can also have solar projects that are a lot smaller and can be on a field, can be in slightly less sunny parts of the country. So if Congress rolls back tax credits that have benefited the solar industry, other factors,

Narayanan says, may work in its favor. But the industry is still on that solar coaster, says Abigail Ross Hopper at the Solar Energy Industries Association. It feels a little bit like, you know, when you're kind of going fast around a corner and you're banking up on the side, right? It feels a bit like that. And she says they're waiting to see if they'll go up or down. I'm Henry App for Marketplace.

Three words, people. Marketplace morning report. Two more words. David Brancaccio. He and the gang get out of bed real early to get you everything you need to know to start your business day. Check it out. It's been a maybe not great start for real estate here in 2025. We mentioned a couple of things the other day. Homebuilder sentiment was down. That's from the National Association of Homebuilders.

And housing starts, the Census Bureau reports, were down in January over a year ago. But what about the people who did buy the past couple of years? Monique Coleman is one of them. She bought a newly built home in Charlestown, West Virginia back in 2023. We had her on back then. Here is the update. Oh my God. The last year has been crazy.

If I can say crazy, insane. I really think I went into home ownership with like rose colored glasses, thinking, oh my God, I'm living the American dream. And then the next thing you know, my windows all have to be replaced. Then after that, my toilets got to be replaced. There's like little simple things that people are like,

you can just shut off the water. And I'm like, what do you mean? And they're like counter clock. And I'm like, wait, take it back. And I'm watching YouTube videos and I'm trying to do all the things. So my work around has been to use my neighbors. Like I literally put an ad in my Facebook group and somebody's husband came to my house to put together a sofa, but what she did not tell me

was that she was sending her children. So I got her husband and her kids over at my house putting together my sofa. I am in a different financial mindset than I was when I started saving because now I am building wealth. Now I have money market accounts and now I have IRAs and things like that. That honestly, if it never would have started with the home ownership, I probably never would have even been thinking about that.

The interest rates, I'm always checking just to see like, hey, right now it's a six, when it gets to a three, do I want to refinance or is it that time to sell? In my mind, I am either gonna do one of two things. I am going to put a for rent sign out in front of this thing and put it for rent and then, you know, get a management company because hello landlord, I am not. Or you know, sell it, right?

Take my equity and then keep it moving. I really feel like me moving to Charlestown, even though the housing situation has been crazy, the experience that it's been for me and my daughter has been great. I found a church home, I found a community of people that I can hang out with, I can be myself. I think home ownership is not for the weak.

I think that I'm happy that I did it because yes, I have a lot of equity now. I said I was gonna buy this happy that I did it because yes, I have a lot of equity now. I said I was going to buy this house and I did it. So on that front, I'm reasonably sure, this week's sign the apocalypse is upon us, with the caveat that James Bond movies have been through the years, misogynist and boring and sometimes just plain bad, I am relatively sure the latest development is not an improvement. The family that has long controlled the franchise

has sold creative control to Amazon. And that means Jeff Bezos now controls who plays James Bond, who writes the script, and when the movies get made I am just telling you right now and right here if Bezos casts himself Which you can totally see happening. I'm out John Buckley John Gordon, no, you're car. I ain't the Parker Amanda Peacher. Come on He would totally do it Stephanie seek are the marketplace editing staff amir, but by always the managing editor. I'm Kyle Rizdall. We will see you tomorrow everybody.